light

The Ancient Greek word for the literary practice which embeds art into its expression is ekphrasis . It’s derived from the combination of two words: ek, which can mean ‘for the sake of,’ and phradzein, meaning ‘to show, point out, describe.’ The recombined definition then yields ekphrasis, or ‘a process carried out for the sake of description.’ The writer or poet, realising that “A picture is worth a thousand words” (or even a hundred), weaves the artwork, which exists independently within its own visual language, into verbal language – in a sense publishing it afresh. Howard Nemerov‘s poem, Vermeer, is a fine example of an ekphrastic poem.

I don’t know anything about Nemerov’s contemplative inclinations, but this poem suggests to me that he was familiar with the state of unconditioned nondual awareness: how else could he come up with a line like ‘At one for once with sunlight’? Perhaps he was a closet Zen Master. The first line of the poem, ‘Taking what is, and seeing it as it is’ could have come straight from the pages of a Zen manual.

Nemerov’s penetrating mindfulness – and by implication, the painter’s as well – flavours other phrases in the poem: ‘Keeping it simple’, ‘being in love with light’, ‘sunlight falling through/A leaded window’, ‘A woman in blue/ Reading a letter’, ‘a lady weighing gold’, ‘Watching the water in the foreground dream/Reflectively’, ‘taking a view of Delft’…

When reading the words ‘If I could say to you, and make it stick’, I muse whether the poem was conceived as being spoken by a wondering Vermeer to a hearer centuries later. It is centuries later right now, and I am moved to reflect upon Nemerov’s lines, to study the paintings referred to in the poem – ‘A girl in a red hat’, a ‘woman in blue/Reading a letter’, the ‘lady weighing gold’, a ‘view of Delft’, to marvel at the apparent paradoxes of ‘seductive modesty’, of ‘holy mathematic’, of the ‘inexorable domesticated into charm’. And to applaud Nemerov’s aspiration: ‘I think we should be for one moment happy/In the great reckoning of those little rooms/Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light …’

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care of daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat’s cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, the lady weighing gold . . .
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

Frederick Franck and my mother were early teachers in how to see and how to love. And if one makes a practice of falling in love, everywhere, with everything, it pushes the reach of one’s arms. Far becomes near. There is no “other” in the margins. Suffering is not on the peripheries. Like beauty, it is palpable and immediate. Drawing can leave you feeling broken and small with God on your skin. It can change your life. And yes, Jordan Wolfson, it can change the world.

My papercutting, while part prayer, is just a fancy way to get back to that line. To illuminate it by leaving it out. It turns the experience of life drawing and its loving inside out. I want to share eyes with you. And to take my time. I want to dig my heels in like a heavy rooted oak in the city’s technetronic center and hold ground and show you how beautiful light is when it’s mediated by shadow.

Claude Monet: November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

I examine the object as if it was a lover, a book, a document. It is willing to offer everything to me, passively. I am moving closer to the object, as close as I can, and it covers me benignly. Warming me to the world of things.

I layer the pencil marks over one another in light strokes, building up the tones carefully. Light glints softly off the graphite surface. The paper colours and imprints like asphalt, a well-worn pavement with pockmarks and incisions. The paper stump forces the graphite into the craters and valleys of the paper – sliding over the surface – burnishing, embossing. I am entranced by this silvery surface – the powder creates a film, grey and silver clouds forming, the lines of pencil changing and perfecting them. Away from the amorphous, I push the image into my favoured safety net … [t]his is the boundary, the structure which allows me to feel held and absorbed, contained and subsumed.

Clear, shadowless sensing; inspired writing. Who else but David Abram?

– – –

Late one evening, I stepped out of my little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out the darkness between them, and loosely scattered in other areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all streamed the great river of light, with its several tributaries. But the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each other by narrow, two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all filled with water. By day, the surface of these pools reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright-green tips of new rice. But by night, the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of starstudded space falling away forever.

I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it; the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might perhaps have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the galaxies below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the constellations overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, the little room in which I lay seemed itself to be floating free of the Earth.

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David Bohm investigates the phenomenon of creativity from all angles. What is a creative mind – and what sabotages its operation? What are the hallmarks of genuine creativity? Can it be cultivated? What is its relationship to health and well-being?

It is [the] flash of realization of not-two-ness, that is both the center and the endpoint of our human experience.
– Frederick Franck

In order to understand the true meaning of Abstract Art, we have to conceive of ourselves as a reflex (reflection) of reality. This means we have to see ourselves as a mirror in which reality reflects itself.
- Piet Mondrian

Seeing is perception with the original, unconditioned eye. It is a state of consciousness in which separation of photographer/subject, audience/image dissolves; in which a reality beyond words and concepts opens up, whose “point” or “meaning” is the direct experience itself.– John Daido Loori